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Supreme Garnish
This is made up of rice, fowl and truffles, seasoned and cooked as follows: Wash thoroughly two ounces of rice, drain and put it into a saucepan with two breakfast cupfuls of white broth or stock. Pound the flesh from the wing of a cooked fowl in a mortar, add to it the rice, season with a tablespoonful of salt and one teaspoonful of white pepper and cook over a moderate fire for thirty minutes; strain through a fine hair-sieve, return it to the saucepan, add half an ounce of butter and three tablespoonfuls of cream, and warm slowly on the stove without boiling. Arrange this garnish in an artistic crown-shape round a hot dish, place the supreme in the center and ornament the garnishing with thin slices of truffles; dip a little meat-glaze over it with a light hair brush, and serve. Supremes of partridges, quails or sweetbreads can all be served with this garnish.
This is a purée-style garnish in the classical mode — essentially a stiff chicken-and-rice velouté piped or spooned into a ring around a plated suprême. A few of the quantities and vessels need translating.
- The salt is wrong for a modern palateA tablespoon of salt and a teaspoon of white pepper for two ounces of rice and the flesh of one chicken wing will be inedible; season to taste, starting with about a quarter teaspoon.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, so two cupfuls is about a pint of stock to 2 oz (a scant third of a cup) of raw rice — a deliberately loose ratio, since the mixture is meant to cook down to a purée rather than to separate grains.
- White broth or stockNot a browned stock but a pale one, made from unroasted veal or poultry bones. A good low-sodium chicken stock stands in; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy the colour.
- Moderate fireOn a stovetop this means a gentle simmer rather than a rolling boil. Thirty minutes at a hard boil risks scorching the rice against the pan before it purées.
- Mortar and hair-sieveThe pounded wing meat and cooked rice were forced through a fine hair sieve — the mesh woven from horsehair — to make them smooth. A food processor followed by a pass through a fine chinois or drum sieve gets you to the same place in a fraction of the time.
- Do not let it boil after the cream goes inThis is the hinge. Once the butter and cream are added the purée is finished only by gentle warming; boiling will split it and roughen the texture the sieving was meant to create.
- Meat-glazeGlace de viande: stock reduced until it sets to a syrupy, near-solid brown jelly. Warmed slightly and brushed on, it gives gloss and depth. A commercial demi-glace concentrate is the practical substitute.
- SuprêmeHere it means the boneless breast, often with the wing joint attached, sautéed or poached and sauced. The garnish is a component, not a dish: the recipe rings one hot dish with it and sets the suprême in the centre.
Oscar Tschirky's book belongs to the moment when American hotel cooking was consciously imitating the French professional kitchen, and this entry is pure Carême-descended grande cuisine: a protein set in the middle of a ring of purée, finished with truffle and a brushed film of meat glaze. The ornamental crown of forcemeat or purée — a bordure — was a standard way of building height and formality on a platter before plated service made such scaffolding unnecessary. Truffle slices used as flat decoration, cut thin and laid on in patterns, were the period's shorthand for luxury, used with a freedom no modern cost sheet would tolerate. The closing note that partridge, quail or sweetbreads may take the same treatment is characteristic of the genre: garnishes were catalogued as interchangeable modules, and a cook was expected to combine them rather than follow a fixed dish from end to end.